Abstract

An Er3+ fiber laser passively mode locked by a resonant saturable absorber mirror achieves more than 130mW average power at 1560nm from a Fabry–Perot cavity. The pulsed regime is self-starting from the CW regime without any Q-switch transition. The output pulse has a duration of 10.2ps and can be extracavity dechirped with 42% efficiency down to 614fs, which represents 1.2 times the Fourier limit imposed by the spectrum. To date, this corresponds to the highest averaged power directly extracted at such a wavelength from a fiber laser mode locked with a saturable absorber mirror.